


freckles in our eyes

by cdocks



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Pre-Kerberos Mission, Romance, shameless schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-18 12:26:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8162021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cdocks/pseuds/cdocks
Summary: pre-kerberos mission. matt has an anxious habit of biting his nails. shiro has a solution. spoiler alert: it's an adorable solution. // shiro/matt, cute fluffy smitten space boys before everything is trauma forever. written for free day of shatt week, posted too late, oops.





	

“Ow! Ow, shit.”

They're in the middle of physics class, and while the wonders of universal constants regarding momentum and energy transference are no doubt fascinating, this emphatic reaction from third-year student Matthew Holt is a little _too_ emphatic. It's fortunate he's in the back of the room, so it's only the TA who hears him swear, who sees him shake his hand around wildly for a moment, then stick his index finger in his mouth. It's unfortunate that the TA is also one of his best friends who will absolutely not Let It Go.

In Shiro's defense, the physics class is one of the drier ones, and everyone in it familiar enough with the material to not really _need_ a TA. So there's plenty of time for him to lean forward during the break, looming over Matt's shoulder and asking politely, “Paper cut?”

Matt jumps a little, turning with his finger still in his mouth, then scowling around it at his friend. “No,” he mumbles, then makes a face and pulls his hand free, shaking it again, the flailing sort of movement that people make when trying to dispel pain. There's a scientific reason for that, something to do with acceleration dulling pain sensors, and normally Matt would blather on about. The fact that he isn't is concerning. “It's nothing.”

It's clearly not, and Shiro is incurably nosy and also has the reflexes of a jungle cat, because his hand moves and suddenly Matt's wrist is caught in it and his dirty little secret exposed. One thick dark eyebrow arches. “You bite your nails?”

Another scowl, and Matt curls his fingers – the nails too short, the skin around them reddened and torn, the index one still sluggishly bleeding from a hangnail pulled free – into a fist. “You snore,” he counters, wiggling to try and get free. “Everyone has flaws.”

The other eyebrow arches.

Matt sighs, softly, the fist relaxing. “Sorry. I'm just...anxious.” The pause is just long enough for the younger man to glance over at the clock, the minute hand moving slowly along, ticking off the time between them and the launch date. It's ever-present, even during exams, even as they undergo round after round of immunizations and take dozens of vitamins and do practice drills every spare moment: the idea that in two short weeks they'll be on their way across the solar system, into the abyss they both love.

It's amazing. It's terrifying. Shiro nods, letting go of Matt's wrist. He understands – of course he understands, he's the second-youngest member of the crew, one of two prodigies chosen from hundreds of candidates. As the pilot, he's conceivably got even more of a reason to be anxious than the engineer-slash-medic. But he still lets go and folds his arms on the desk and smiles, resting his chin on Matt's shoulder for a moment.

“We've gotta find you a less painful way of being anxious. What if you have to operate on one of us in zero-gravity and you can't because you chewed off all your fingernails?” It's teasing, but his cheek presses against the half-inch of neck visible above Matt's uniform collar and Matt shivers down to his core.

A squirm, a blush he can feel hot on his ears and Matt's laughing it off, hands folding in his lap. “I think it's physically impossible for me to chew off _all_ my fingernails,” he retorts. “Also I'm a medic, not a surgeon, Shiro.”

Shiro laughs too and sits back, and it seems to be forgotten for a moment.

Except that night the door to Matt's tiny one-man dorm – the benefits of being on an interstellar crew, supposedly, but the AC is busted and there's a scary stain on the corner of the carpet – is pushed open and there's an excited grin and an exclaim of “I've got it!” and Shiro is dumping approximately three zillion narrow long strips of paper all over Matt and his chemistry textbook. There's a pause while the younger man looks down at himself and the papers, then back up at his friend.

“Am I a hamster? Is this my nesting material?” Matt's voice is very flat, and this is probably because he's got a couple strips in his mouth.

It's a true testament to their friendship that all Shiro does is laugh. He pushes aside some of the strips and sits cross-legged on Matt's bed, making the slats creak. They're made for supporting noodley medics after all, not pilots who could benchpress their own ships. “Look, see, my cousin taught me this when I was a kid.” Shiro picks up one of the strips, looping it and tying a sort of knot, then wrapping the long end around and around until he has a tiny pentagon shape, no bigger than his thumbnail. With a dexterity that he normally doesn't show, he pinches each of the five corners into a point, puffing up the paper as he does so, then reaching to take Matt's hand.

That shivery, melty feeling is back in the pit of Matt's stomach as Shiro turns his hand palm-up and drops the tiny paper star into it. “It's so you don't bite your nails,” is the excited explanation, and his friend's eyes are so bright, so earnest. “So you don't hurt yourself anymore. If you get anxious, you can just make one of these. Or ten, or whatever.”

Matt must be staring, because Shiro's smile drops a bit, and he starts to pull his hand away, getting that blush over the bridge of his nose. He always blushes just there, starting in his cheeks, spreading over his face like a mask.

It's funny, the things you notice after spending three years gazing at someone.

Like how Shiro's about to apologize, stumble back over things he said honestly and openly, berate himself for being too excited, too bold. Matt knows what it looks like, and he knows how to stop it. So he moves his other hand, catching Shiro's with it, still cradling the little paper star in his palm.

“Thank you.” It's all he needs to say to bring that smile back. “Show me again how to do it?”

Shiro's shifting to get more comfortable, fiddling with a strip of paper in his free hand, because the one, the right one, is still pressed between Matt's hands. It's warm and soft, fingertips slightly rough, bigger than Matt's hands, palm cupped slightly like he's holding something precious. “If you make a thousand you get to make a wish,” Shiro says, looking down at their hands, still red-faced, still smiling. “but that'd probably take weeks.”

* * *

 

“Nine and a half months.”

Shiro blinks a couple times, looking up from his data pad in time to see Matt walk in. That is, he enters the room – it's not so much walking as it is “floating”, due to the lack of gravity. Saving energy in space means sometimes turning off the artificial gravity in the large rooms, and it's easy enough to read while hovering midway between the couch and ceiling.

So Shiro's stretched out, wearing the snugly-fitting uniform the whole Kerberos crew was given shortly before leaving Earth. It's in Garrison shades, grey and white and orange, (their comms officer back on Earth had grumbled at length about the color scheme) but Shiro doesn't particularly mind. As long as it fits. Besides, he's personalized it over the past nine months in space – mending a tear on the sleeve, gathering some deep-set astronaut-food stains on the cuffs that no amount of space laundering could remove, doodling little constellations on the knees. It feels lived-in, by now, a part of him as much as the overgrown tuft of hair on his forehead that Matt calls a “forelock”. (“you know, like a horse? You don't know anything about horses?” “I'm a _pilot_ , Matt. A spaceship pilot, not a horse pilot.” “They're called jockeys, Shiro, oh my god.”)

The tuft is floating around in the zero-gravity, which means both Shiro's thick eyebrows are visible when he arches them curiously at his crewmate, who's still floating by the door, holding what looks like a big glass cookie jar. “Nine and a half months for what?” he asks, perplexed.

Matt smiles a little, shifting where he hovers, his own uniform loose around the elbows and knees, baggy on his noodley frame. The contents of the jar shift a little as well, spots of color alternating with white, looking like an enormous amount of candy or sprinkles. Shiro frowns at it, letting go of his pad and leaving it to float beside him.

“The first thousand...I kept messing up and having to start over and...so it took me until after the launch, so...so I couldn't wish for the launch to go well.” Matt's stammering, reaching up and adjusting his glasses awkwardly. Samuel's told him a million times that Earth-style frames are just asking for trouble in space, but he's too used to them now. After all, not everyone can pull off Commander Holt's lanyard-bearing glasses. That's a dad-exclusive style.

Shiro straightens up, pushing off one of the many criss-crossing exposed pipes on the ceiling of the ship (if you don't have momentum and force in zero-g, you'll just flail around and not get anywhere...not that Shiro's had firsthand experience with that or anything) and floating over to Matt. Almost as an afterthought, he reaches out, hooks the wire-rimmed glasses back into place on his friend's ears. Matt fidgets with them too much, gets them dislodged and more than once they've just come detached and floated away. Besides, there isn't much time to worry about personal space when you're in a tiny ship floating between asteroids.

“The launch _did_ go well,” he offers, still perplexed, reaching up and bracing one hand against the pipes above them so he stays hovering at Matt's eye level.

There's a laugh, one of those soft, nervous ones that Matt's given more and more often around Shiro. Nine months up here, them and Sam and the voices from Earth, surrounded by stars. They'd trained for this, for not having a ton of privacy or time to be alone, trained in conflict resolution and communication, because it'd be the worst thing ever to have a grudge against someone you're stuck with for two years solid.

But it'd been easy. It'd been Matt, so of course it'd been easy. They'd gone from friendship to something Shiro didn't quite have words for. He knows what every one of Matt's smiles means, knows how to read his mood in his sighs or fidgeting. He uses “we” instead of “I”. Commander Holt is close too, of course, but it's different – he's a superior, a guiding force.

Matt is...a _part_ of Shiro now.

So he understands the laugh, but not the reason behind it, looking at the glass jar, at Matt's face, lit by the artificial light of the ship, underlit by the thousands of stars outside. The other young man shifts and bites at his lower lip and something under Shiro's ribs suddenly _aches_.

“I-It did. The launch and...the whole trip and...Shiro, everything, it's a dream come true, this is all I ever wanted.” Another laugh, this one less nervous, bright like Matt's big amber eyes and the yearning ache is crawling up and down Shiro's spine and what is this, _what is this?_ “Being out here, with my dad, with...with you. I thought I didn't have anything else to wish for.”

He moves then, unscrewing the lid of the jar, shaking it gently, and Shiro suddenly understands. Over the past almost-year – two weeks before the launch, the entire voyage thus far – it's become natural to see Matt's always-fidgety hands tearing long strips of paper, folding them over and around, pinching the corners, making tiny paper stars. Shiro hadn't thought much of it, just happy that his anxiety-reducing technique had worked.

But now they're here, floating somewhere beyond Pluto, just the two of them, and there are hundreds of tiny paper stars floating out of the glass jar, in every color, every hue. Some are notebook paper, some torn-up old assignments, others are specially-bought patterned paper from the scrapbooking store. There's definitely more than a thousand, so many that the air around and between the two of them is full of stars.

Shiro's eyes go wide, hand sweeping forward, gently gathering a handful of the paper stars, letting them slip through his fingers and float past him. “How...?” he begins, looking down at Matt, surprised and delighted and chest tight with something he can't name.

There are tiny paper stars in Matt's hair, and he's cradling the empty jar to his chest. He's smiling at Shiro, smiling and smiling and hopeful. “I calculated it out, once,” he replies, soft. “There are 394,200 minutes in nine months. We spend about 129,600 asleep, 194,400 working or running tests or debriefing, which leaves 70,200 free minutes. It takes me about two minutes per star, so that's--”

“There are more than thirty-five _thousand_ of these?” Shiro interrupts, looking back around them, wondering wildly if the ship's air filters are going to clog and die. What a way to go, death by tiny orgami stars.

Matt laughs, shaking his head, sending stars scattering from the ends of his hair. “No, no, these were just the best ones. I kept the best ones for the jar and put the mistakes in the incinerator. I wanted...I wanted just the perfect stars. I really wanted...whatever I wished for to come true.” He falters, lets go of the jar, lets it float to one side, paper stars bumping gently against its sides. One hand reaches out, resting on Shiro's chest.

Shiro covers the hand without thinking, brow furrowing when he realizes Matt is trembling. “What did you wish for?” he asks. He thinks he knows the answer. He hopes he knows the answer.

He does. Matt looks up, lips parted, eyes bright and scared and hopeful. Thousands of dollars in space studies and tests and prototypes and training, and for that moment Shiro forgets where they are and why they're there. All he can see is the paper stars caught in this boy's hair, the silent question behind those dorky glasses. All he sees is Matt.

So it makes perfect sense to answer that question, to lean down, to satisfy the ache in his chest, to kiss him. His mouth is soft, lips chapped, and his hand comes up and touches Shiro's face, his cheek, the line of his jaw, reverent and wondering. Shiro is weightless, mid-air, wrapping both arms around that slight frame, heart thudding in his chest. His eyes are closed, but he can still see the paper stars, the different hues, thousands of wishes for this. For them.

When they've caught their breath and Matt's pulled himself forward to curl close and happy and shaky against Shiro's chest, there are dozens of little stars crushed between their bodies, their purpose complete, the wish granted. Shiro asks, soft, against Matt's ear – “So that _was_ what you wished for, right?” – and Matt laughs and nods, cheek resting over the steady beat of Shiro's pulse, watching a blue and yellow star bump against a pink one. They'll likely have to clean this up soon, before the stars get caught in the vents or the cracks of the ship and Commander Holt lectures them both.

But for now they're wrapped up in each other's arms, floating in a cloud of tiny paper stars, about to land on Kerberos and everything is bright and hopeful and perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> so yes, i started this on day two of shatt week and...did not finish until today. oh well, at least i got it out in time for the week, even if it doesn't technically fit any of the prompts? 
> 
> also i've been making these stars nonstop at work since it's been a stressful time, and they actually really are great for anxiety! i also pick/bite my nails, and it's a good way to focus my hands~ [here's](http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-lucky-paper-stars/) a good tutorial if you're interested in making your own and/or are as thirsty as matt to smooch your hot TA bff.


End file.
